17 comments:

The study also says that younger children have a lot more adventurousness, and that really breathtaking breakthroughs in knowledge are often by younger siblings.

The study is already within the Norwegian population, and perhaps over there the eldest use their siblings for target practice when kicking soccer balls or something and so all the concussions are bringing down the IQs in successors. At any rate, two to three points is within the standard deviation of most IQ tests, so I don't think this matters.

I'd send it to my younger brother but he'd send back some brilliant response as, like TabithaRuth, he's way smarter than I am. I'm also more adventurous than he is. So, I can make no use of this opportunity. Unfortunately.

Finally we have some documentation about something that we have known about for a long time.

So, yes, I will send this to at least some of my younger siblings. At least one of them doesn't do well with this sort of thing, so I will probably spare him.

The usual comeback that I usually get from the second born is that oldest were often left out to die in ages (way) past, presumably due to the higher incidence (at least according to him) of birth caused brain damage.

We span 20 years among the seven of the kids in my family. I'm the baby, now 47. The two eldest were out of the house and in the Army by the time I was born, and not part of my life growing up; we've grown closer as adults. The oldest barely finished high school, but I don't doubt he's smarter than most of us. He can learn or do anything he sets his mind to -- build a house, fix a diesel engine, plant and maintain an orchard, speak and write several languages. He put up a MySpace page last year, and I'm gaining a whole new dimension to my sense of family history from it, and getting to know him all over again.